Asus One of the First to Strike with an Intel Thunderbolt Certified Motherboard

Asus on Monday announced the launch of its P8Z77-V Premium motherboard, the flagship slice of silicon in the P8Z77 Series and, as it happens to be the case, the first Intel certified mainboard to boast a Thunderbolt interface, the company claims. Remember Thunderbolt? It's the previously much hyped high-speed interface from Intel that was supposed to give USB 3.0 a run for its money, though Intel claimed from Day 1 that the two technologies were meant to co-exist and not necessarily compete with each other.

Whatever the case may be, Asus made sure to point out that "Thunderbolt is 2 times faster than USB 3.0 and an incredible 20 times faster than USB 2.0." It has a maximum bi-directional speed of 10Gbps, and you can daisy chain up to six Thunderbolt devices on the P8Z77-V Premium, which also offers full display support for a seventh Thunderbolt or DisplayPort equipped monitor.

Luckily for those of you who are lovers of technology and not fighters of interface standards, there are plenty of USB options on the P8Z77-V Premium as well, including four USB 3.0 ports on the back panel and two on the mainboard, and half a dozen USB 2.0 ports overall (two on back, four on the mainboard).

Full specs can be found on the P8Z77-V Premium's product page. No word yet on price or availability.

Comments

I will worry about Thunderbolt when it becomes mainstream. I have been around in the IT field for too long. Seen these types of products come and go too many times. I think there is a place for TB, but I am not going to play guinea pig with my wallet for Intel.

Wasn't there just an article, I forget where, talking about how Thunderbolt was already on it's way out since there's such a high premium for it with limited products available... that also have a higher premium.
Some of this is just early adopter/growing pains for the tech, but with it competing with a USB3.0 that's becoming standardized much faster, I'm thinking Thunderbolt is going to have a slow go of it until USB3.0 loses some of it's shiny new goodness.
Maybe a year or two, Thunderbolt will be more readily available as USB3.0 will be the new standard. With that, will hopefully be more affordable and available Thunderbolt devices, some of which may be USB3.0/TB ready for broader compatibility.
By then, SATA12Gb/s will be stealing the show though ^_^